AuthorTopic: Mounting IDE drive via USB-IDE cable (Read 24630 times)

I found one or two threads on this topic that didn't provide a lot of help. I'm new to Vector, coming from ZenWalk Linux. I've got a Vantec SATA/IDE to USB adapter to pull some data off a couple of old drives. Drives are set to "Master". I believe the drives are ext2 formatted but can't recall for sure.

This looked promising however the last few lines suggest that the partition table on the drives can't be read. Which is weird because they seemed to be working fine earlier today when I pulled them out. Looks like I may have to try another method unless I'm missing something.

In other news, my old 600X laptop running VL 6.0 Light Final found and installed the drive in /mnt/vl-hot effortlessly. I don't see the vl-hot directory in my 7.0 install. Did I miss something on my install? I'm a little fuzzy on how HAL may mount peripherals as opposed to vl-hot if vl-hot has been deprecated.

Thanks bigpaws. The link you provided is dead end, unfortunately although I have done other searches for similar problems in different platforms. I'll see if I can't track down the post but I've done a reasonable search for this issue and tried solutions that worked in other distros (setting SATA mode to AHCI rather than IDE, allowing the drive to powerup before connecting, removing module uas, adding usb_storage to module.conf).

The detailed format that I annotated was after running the echo -l command which was also suggested by uelsk8s. I got the detailed recognition and failure information after running the command and rebooting.

Given that 6.0 on my laptop seemed to recognize the drive, I downloaded the 6.0 Live iso to try that, but when I went to burn it, k3b informed me it couldn't find the optical drive (which is also external) and asked if hal was running. ps -aux suggests that the hal daemon is running:

Optical drives do not show in fdisk, period. So that is not a problem. What I don't get is why it is showing EXT4-fs and FAT-fs messages with regards to sr0, which should be the optical drive. Is the drive using an external power adapter, or just USB power?

With regards to the hard drive, I have similar issues with a certain 2.5" 160GB IDE hard drive, with an enclosure and also with an adapter cable. It works well on some computers, not at all on others, and intermittently on some more... In fact, on a certain core 2 quad PC with Win7 (not mine) it always ends up becoming unreadable with the enclosure, while working for short periods with the adapter cable. I ended up attributing all this to the power requirements of this particular drive, which (I guess) are OK for some USB sockets, but not all. Also, the enclosure seems to draw more power than the adapter cable.

Logged

O'Neill (RE the Asgard): "Usually they ask nicely before they ignore us and do what they damn well please."http://joe1962.bigbox.infoRunning: VL 7 Std 64 + self-cooked XFCE-4.10

Optical drives do not show in fdisk, period. So that is not a problem. What I don't get is why it is showing EXT4-fs and FAT-fs messages with regards to sr0, which should be the optical drive. Is the drive using an external power adapter, or just USB power?

With regards to the hard drive, I have similar issues with a certain 2.5" 160GB IDE hard drive, with an enclosure and also with an adapter cable. It works well on some computers, not at all on others, and intermittently on some more... In fact, on a certain core 2 quad PC with Win7 (not mine) it always ends up becoming unreadable with the enclosure, while working for short periods with the adapter cable. I ended up attributing all this to the power requirements of this particular drive, which (I guess) are OK for some USB sockets, but not all. Also, the enclosure seems to draw more power than the adapter cable.

Thanks for the heads up on fdisk and opticals. The drive is recognized by the bios and will mount. It just seems that HAL is not recognizing it. The old laptop where it did mount was using VL 6.0 and vl-hot. The optical drive has dual USB cables. It will run on a single but the manufacturer recommends using the dual.

The hard drive is independently powered with it's own transformer so it's not a usb power issue. I've played around a bit with the USB BIOS settings with no luck. I've tried 3 live distros, none of which detected the drive at all although I may have pooched something playing around with the BIOS settings so I need to step back through that process. I'm staring to lean to this being a hardware issue as you've suggested with . I'll have to look in to the device a bit more and make see if there are any compatibility issues. The `pooter itself is new (Zotac Zbox) so there may be something with it's architecture that I need to play with.

I did find what appears to be a solution at https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=125831 with regards to the delay for usb_storage. I'm just not sure where or how to add "usb-storage.delay_use=5" to the kernel to test this out. I'm not all that familiar with kernel options etc.

My challenge is more that I'm unable to mount either an external hard drive or optical drive after booting. There is no problem booting VL on the box I'm using. The longer usb_storage.delay_use setting (5 seconds versus 1 second) allows firmware in the peripheral to get done whatever they need to do before being scanned by the kernel's usb_storage module. At least, I'm hoping this will work.

-edit-- I did try the rootdelay=9 as a boot parameter via lilo but still no joy. It's quite odd. I've tried on a few live CD's that have the delay_use=5 setting with no luck. The box picks up a regular USB storage device no problem, my Galaxy S cell phone no problem, but it just can't seem to figure out this drive adapter. And it still shows as having no optical drive :-p. It looks like I may have to use USB cards to transfer my data from the drive because my ancient laptop can pick it up no problem